Today is the International Day of the Right to the Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims, established by the United Nations General Assembly.

The truth is the only path to healing and progress for human communities after mass atrocities.

The world we live in is increasingly overwhelmed by violence and a lack of truth about crimes.

The horror of yesterday’s terrorist attack in Moscow, where over 130 innocent civilians were killed, demands the truth about the masterminds and perpetrators and their fair punishment. Anything else is just a path to further hatred and bloodshed.

The truth must also be known about the horrific terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023, in Israel, where 1,200 people, mostly young, were killed and over 200 were abducted. Unfortunately, Israel has been carrying out a disproportionate military response to this Hamas terrorist attack for the past five months, leading to an unprecedented number of innocent civilian casualties. So far, at least 32,000 people have been killed in Palestine, including 13,000 children, and more than 74,188 have been injured, including 8,663 children. Over 8,000 people are reported missing. It seems like retribution is being carried out, which as a principle of warfare is prohibited by international law.

UN experts have called for an urgent response and priority investigation and prosecution of those responsible for these war crimes and crimes against humanity, and we support their appeal.

On European soil, the war in Ukraine, initiated by the Russian Federation two years ago, has claimed the lives of over 10,582 civilians, including 587 children, and injured more than 19,875, of whom 1,298 are children. The terrorist attacks in Moscow and Israel, as well as the war in Palestine, cannot hide the fact that Russia is waging an aggressive war in Ukraine, contrary to international law.

Besides these, there are currently twenty-five other armed conflicts ongoing in the world.

Today also marks the 25th anniversary of the start of NATO’s bombing of Serbia and Montenegro, in which many innocent people of Serbian, Albanian, and other nationalities died, and Serbia’s infrastructure was heavily damaged. The bombing represented an open violation of the UN Charter and was justified by the terror of the Serbian army and police over Albanians in Kosovo. The severe suffering of civilians and so-called collateral damage in this bombing (such as the attack on the building of Television Belgrade, the center of Niš, Aleksinac, Murino in Montenegro) never received a judicial epilogue, although the crimes in Kosovo have been somewhat clarified.

Montenegro has not done enough to ensure justice for the victims of its war crimes, which fall under gross human rights violations. War crimes from the 1990s were improperly prosecuted, and as a result, the Supreme Court denied some victims access to compensation, citing the statute of limitations.

The Human Rights Action (HRA) has proposed to the governments of Zdravko Krivokapić, Dritan Abazović, and Milojko Spajić to compensate the victims of the crimes in Bukovica, Kaluđerski laz, Murino, and the Deportation of Refugees, whose claims were dismissed as time-barred, only because the state has so far failed to establish the responsibility of any person for these crimes, although criminal responsibility for war crimes does not expire.

We still expect the Special State Prosecutor’s Office to face the truth and respond to the expectations. The victims of war crimes in Montenegro are real. Unfortunately, for their suffering, almost no one has been punished.

Civilian war victims are still not recognized by the Law on Veterans’ and Disability Protection. After some MPs tried to consider only the victims of the armed conflict with NATO in Montenegro as civilian war victims, and not those from Montenegro who died in armed conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, or Kosovo, and after protests by HRA, the “Štrpci – Against Forgetting” Association and the Bosniak Council at the end of last year, the discriminatory law was withdrawn from parliamentary procedure to prescribe a new, comprehensive solution that grants social protection and compensation rights to all civilian victims of the wars in the 1990s. However, nearly a month has passed since the deadline, March 1, given to the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare to draft such a solution, and the proposal for the new solution is still unknown.

Montenegro still does not have a law on the rehabilitation and compensation of victims of political persecution, prisoners, and detainees at Goli Otok, Sveti Grgur, and other prisons, although there were 3,390 Montenegrins on Goli Otok alone, which is over a fifth of the total number of prisoners and proportionately the highest number relative to the population of any of the former Yugoslav republics. Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia have long had laws compensating these victims. Besides compensation, the families of the victims also have the right to the truth, which is why we call on the National Security Agency, which holds the archives of this massacre, to finally open them. All state institutions are obliged, after 30 years of declaring the files closed, to hand them over to the State Archives of Montenegro, and 50 years in the case of security service materials, which ANB has never done.

Denying the rights of victims of human rights violations is a devaluation of human rights as such and sets back a democratic society. The Government of Montenegro must make a crucial effort to ensure that all victims of past gross human rights violations receive satisfaction and are not forgotten. Such a concrete break with the war past, based on moral and legal principles, would be an important pledge for a secure future of our state.

The International Day for the Right to the Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims was established in memory of Oscar Arnulfo Romero, Archbishop of El Salvador, who was killed while holding mass after criticizing massive human rights violations, murders, and torture during the civil war and social injustice. No one has been held accountable for his murder, but his fight for a fairer society is still remembered and honored today. The Human Rights Action (HRA) pays tribute to all human rights defenders who lost their lives in this struggle.